


known sounds

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Series: tell the wolves I'm coming home [5]
Category: DCU (Animated), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dysfunctional Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-10 15:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1161696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Artemis' father teaches her a lot of things, but she’d be hard pressed to say what it was she actually learned. </p><p>There was one thing she finally figured out for herself, though: it could always be worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this after thinking long and hard about what Artemis says to her father (“You taught us it’s every girl for herself in this family,”) and about what she says to Wally in Bialya (“This must be another one of [Dad’s] stupid tests—he probably wants me to kill you”). What do you do when someone who ought to love you loves you badly?

“Mom and Dad went out last night,” Jade says, skinny shoulders close and sullen. She’s talking to Artemis from across the room, sitting cross-legged on her own bed. Like always, Artemis can’t quite tell what Jade is getting at—Mom and Dad go out a lot, and come home with bruises, and then Mom makes dinner while Jade and Dad run drills on the roof of the apartment. Last night was a Thursday; it makes perfect, mundane sense that _Mom and Dad_ _went out last night_ , even if Jade is talking like Artemis should be having a revelation. 

Artemis says as much while focusing on her stuffed bear (Bear has a loose seam and Mom said she wasn’t going to fix him any more, so Artemis either has to ask Dad or Jade to suture him. Bear deserves a professional, and Artemis is, according to her elders, too little to handle sutures. Jade likes to point out that she learned how to suture when she was years younger than Artemis is now. Bear can probably last a little longer, Artemis thinks; Dad is usually busy). 

“It’s a wonder you notice anything going on around here,” Jade says, her voice going sulky and smooth with anger. That’s a warning sign—last time Jade sounded like that, all cool and sweet, Artemis woke up to a dead pigeon on her pillow, its purple guts smeared into her hair—so she puts Bear down, carefully, and looks to her sister, checking for any of the tells Dad always says Jade has in abundance. She can only find one real sign that something is wrong: Jade has a long red scrape up her shin and a purpling bruise on her shoulder, deep enough to go to the bone.

Jade hasn’t had an abrasion since Artemis was six, so the mark is a sign that Jade was off her game, or clumsy, or just too slow; but it’s not enough to reveal anything, expect that Jade was doing something that ended with a bruise. Which is enough to go by, really, in the Crock family; Artemis just doesn’t recall Dad having the time to run drills in the past week—and anyway, he rarely trains with lengths of pipe, which is probably what left a mark that size and shape. Jade likely has a cracked collarbone, which could account for her irritation.

“Were you out with them?” Artemis asks, finally, and can’t help the little rush of jealousy she feels; Dad and Mom’ll take her out when she’s ready, not before, but Jade always gives the dual impressions that one, Artemis will never be ready and two, Jade was born ready; Dad always says his girls are quick learners, but he says it most about Jade. 

Jade shrugs. “Old news,” she says, but she still sounds harsh. “Last night’s almost not worth talking about, not our best work.” 

“So why bring it up?” Artemis asks, on the verge of losing interest. Jade isn’t in the specific frame of mind she needs to be in for Artemis to ask for a favor as big as sewing up Bear’s seams. 

“The job fell through,” Jade says. “There was…a bit of collateral damage.”

“Don’t be cagey with your sister, Jade,” Dad says from the doorway. He’s still wearing his work clothes, but his gloves are off, his palms crisscrossed with rope burns; his arms are crossed over his chest, but he holds his hands in the cradle of his elbows, to keep the raw skin from touching anything. “The job’s not the thing that fell.”

Artemis loves her father, he is an insurmountable force, but he terrifies her. The way he’s talking now makes all the fine hair on her arms stand up. “What happened?” She asks, shivering, hiding the shiver as best she can.

Her father looks at her, one of his long, slow judgments. “Your mother fell,” he says.

Artemis feels the bottom of her belly fall out, she feels dizzy and frightened and weightless, “is Mom—” she can’t get the word out.

“She ain’t dead,” Dad says. “Get that look off your face.” It’s an order, and Artemis finds comfort in it. 

“She’s in jail, she’s going to get convicted,” Jades bites out, “and Dad’s not going to get her out.” 

“Your mother,” Dad enunciates carefully, “knew the risks of the job. It’s her own damn fault she missed the jump, and she knows—shut your fool mouth, Jade, you know too—that she’s responsible for her own failures. Not much I can do for a cripple.”

“Can we see her?” Artemis asks, “what’s gonna happen?” She wants to say, what’s going to happen to me? Artemis is a little small for her age and Dad hasn’t started training her yet, or at least hasn’t started training her with weapons. He’ll teach her how to fall, but she can’t imagine him helping her reach the burners on the stove; Mom did most of the cooking, and Jade’s at best inconsistent about helping Artemis. 

“Not going anywhere near that big house, baby girl,” Dad says. “Crocks don’t believe in getting caught.”

 “Crocks don’t even take care of their own,” Jade mutters. Dad glares at her so hard Artemis wants to hide under the bed, but Jade’s so tough she doesn’t even flinch.

“Jade, I’m not warning you again,” Dad says. “You played your own part last night; you’re too old for me to go over the rules again.” He turns to Artemis. “With your mom gone, it’ll be the three of us. You’ll need to pull your weight.” 

Jade flounces off the bed and out their window, her feet slipping on the ledge as she clambers roof-wards; Dad doesn’t make a move to go after her, doesn’t even say anything about her form, which is so bad that even Artemis could do better. 

“I thought I was too little,” Artemis says, trying not to sound like a baby. She doesn’t manage it.

“That’s not an excuse,” Dad says. “You’re a Crock, aren’t you? You’re one of my girls. You’ll pick things up if you put your mind to it.” He walks into the room, sits down on the bed next to her; she can see bruises rising up under his fair skin—next to him she looks almost dark, she has her mother’s coloring—and takes Bear from where she tucked him. For a second Artemis is afraid he’ll take Bear away, say she’s too big for stuffed animals now, but instead he just examines the busted seams.

“It got ripped,” she explains, even though Dad hasn’t looked at her since he sat down, hasn’t asked her for an explanation. Artemis is always explaining herself to her father, even though he has never once asked her to. “I don’t know how to sew him back up.”

“I won’t fix it for you, baby girl,” Dad says, as if she would ever have worked up the courage to ask, “but I can teach you how to do it yourself.”

To her surprise, he actually gets up and gets the kit from the kitchen and has her sit down at the table and lay out what she’ll need to fix the seam: suture, needles, scissors, and cotton balls to replace some lost stuffing. It’s not as hard as she thought, even if Jade thumps back in through the bedroom window and shoves past her, startling Artemis enough to drive the needle into her own thumb. She bites the side of her cheek and doesn’t make a sound, though she ends up blotting her thumb on Bear’s new seam. It feels almost like victory.

“It’s a start,” Dad says, about either the suture or the injury Artemis sustained while performing the task. “You’ll learn.”

“I learned on one of the employees,” Jade says, referring to the nameless men Dad contracts every now and then. It’s not quite an accusation, not quite a boast. Artemis wonders how it would feel, to drag the needle through flesh; her thumb throbs at the heavy, fast memory.

“I learned on myself,” Dad answers. “Your mother learned the same way.”

If mom were here now, she might say something about how Jade and Artemis have it easier, have opportunities; as she isn’t, the message comes through in Dad’s tone of voice. Jade shuts up and drinks the last of the rice milk from the carton. Even obscured by the cardboard container, Artemis can glimpse the dark smear of Jade’s anger and Jade’s sadness, all over her face: it makes her more beautiful and terrible than usual, and if Dad weren’t in the room—scratch that, if Dad weren’t home, if he wasn’t sitting at the table and still holding Bear in his big, raw hands—Artemis would run to her, would press as close as she could get to her sister, the way Jade sometimes lets Artemis press close after a nightmare. As if it could help.

Dad recognizes the shape of Jade in that moment, and as soon as he puts Bear back down Artemis snatches him and scrambles back to her room, forgetting the contents of the suture kit still dashed over the table; just like Dad can sense disobedience, Artemis can sense the way he shifts from Dad and his daughter to Sportsmaster and one of his people. She knows better than to get caught in the middle of the inevitable screaming match. Even Mom always said it was better to the Dad and Jade fight it out: they were too alike, or perhaps too dissimilar—stone and stone, or water against stone—to get in between the two of them. 

Artemis is in the advanced reading group in school. She sits on her bed, in the open—it is very important not to look as though she is hiding from her family—staring at the yellowed pages of her library copy of Cricket in Times Square. She’ll have to read the chapter again, later; her attention keeps wandering from the text to the quiet rise and fall of her father’s voice through the apartment walls, the little silences into which Jade must be responding.

It’s not so different in the house, with Mom gone; the noises and the silences in between them are the sounds of home. Artemis figures she’ll get used to it, that in time, this will become familiar. In time, it might feel safe.


	2. Chapter 2

There is an unspoken rule in the Crock house: Artemis does not miss school. It would be easy to drop off the radar entirely—Jade has managed it in the easy way that Jade broke most rules--but Dad tells Artemis that she’s better under the radar rather than off it. “Besides,” he says: “your mother wouldn't like it if you skipped school.”

It’s this last, thrown-away statement that convinces her to go, most days, because he hardly ever talks about Mom.

Dad has never believed in wasting time, even if he simultaneously does not believe in hasty action. After That Night—after it becomes clear that her mother will be charged with some combination of crimes and will not be coming home—Artemis is reminded of the many skills required of Crock women. Jade takes great delight in waking her up at odd hours and making her scale the sidewalls to the roof, and Dad meets her at the kitchen table at nearly every meal with a different lock for her to pick, or with a suture pack and one of her stuffed animals.

It’s still almost three weeks before he takes Artemis to the bunker—to one of the bunkers—and sets Jade to teach her how to roll with a fall while he sits at the edge of the mats and takes care of paperwork. It’s astonishing, Artemis thinks, how much must be done for her mother now that she is going to prison.

Jade teaches falls about as ruthlessly as she does everything else: Artemis has the wind knocked out of her at least seven times before she gets fed up and hits back.

“Oh, that is not on,” Jade says, and dodges. She cackles and runs right back, full tilt, shoving Artemis up against the wall and getting a knee in the center of her chest. “Can’t you take a joke? You won’t get far if you can’t grow a thicker skin.” 

Dad looks up from the forms he’s falsifying and says, “Jade.” It’s enough to make her back down, but it’s not enough to make Artemis stop glaring or Jade stop cackling.  

“I know how to fall,” Artemis sulks. “I’m not a baby.” 

“Oh?” Dad rises, leaving the papers at the edge of the mat, and toes off his boots. “Well, let’s see what you can do, then.” He walks to the center and stands like a tree; Artemis’ father is the strongest man in the world. 

“Come at me now,” he tells her, “with everything you got.” He is serious and Artemis is afraid, all her irritation gone; her father moves at her and she realizes that he could hurt her, that every slap Jade has dealt over the years is a soft touch in comparison. Even though she has no chance at all of hurting him back, she cannot make her move. She closes her eyes, squares her stance, and waits for the impact.

It doesn’t come; she opens one eye, then the other, to see her father looming over her, his face impassive, hands shelved on his hips. He doesn’t say anything—he doesn’t have to—and Jade has stopped laughing. Artemis curls her toes into the mat and gets used to the hot rush of shame filling her up and throwing her over, harder than any other fall ever could be.

“All right, baby girl,” Dad says, still looming. “You’ve proved my point. Now learn how to prove me wrong.”

“Yes, sir,” Artemis says. There is something in her that doesn’t let her look away when her father is talking, and he nods.

Later, he sets up a target and hands her compound bow that is just a little too heavy for her. Her arms tremble as she holds it steady, and Dad stands close behind her as she nocks the arrow and tries to keep it on the string; it’s hard work, not at all cool or fierce, and she can feel sweat rising along the line of her back and beneath her arms, part exertion and part anxiety. Dad leans closer, puts his face right alongside her own, cheek to cheek—Artemis thinks she could almost feel the rasp of his stubble when he reaches out and adjusts the set of the arrow. 

"Dad," she says, more to herself than to him—Dad doesn’t hold with chatter, with backtalk, with the noises Artemis cannot help but make, but sometimes he seems to tolerate it, “what happens if I don't make the shot?”

"That depends entirely on you, baby girl," he says, like it isn't a stupid question. "Try loosing the arrow now. Hit the target enough and we can start aiming at things that move."

She take a shallow breath and lets go, keeping her elbow high and still. When the arrow hits the target, her father settls his hand on her back for a long second, long enough that she almost lets the tension roll out of her shoulders, before he draws away and inspects the target. It’s a good shot; Artemis is a little proud of herself, all of a sudden, of her ability to aim true. 

Dad pulls the arrow out of the target and walks across the room to hand it back to her.

“Again,” he says. “Do it like that again and I’ll try you with a pigeon.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

Before she can get giddy about going out with Dad, even if it is just for a little job, Jade pinches the inside of Artemis’ elbow hard and Artemis remembers to bite back her enthusiasm. Dad must still notice the little uptick in how Artemis moves, the little twitch of a thrill that chases through her, because he laughs and hits her across the back, hard enough to hurt but not hard enough that he really means it.

“Ain’t the first time you’ve come out at night, baby girl,” he says. “We used to take you with us when you were babies, both of you, until you got big enough to stay home.”

“Really?” Artemis can’t help asking the question—Dad talks about Mom so rarely, just barely gets a faraway look when the girls say anything about her, as if the woman does not currently exist—and she can’t even imagine, can’t remember being so young. 

“She had a sling,” Jade says, as though she remembers it.

“We both did,” Dad says, still in his strange mood as he checks the packs. “We took turns carrying you.”

She can’t help one last question, even though she can tell Dad’s mood is slipping. “What was I like, as a baby?”

“You were smaller,” he says, like the memory is fond and easy. “You slept through the night.” He shoulders his pack—she wonders how heavy she was, when she was a baby—and settles his mask over his face, and takes on the heavy weight of this current job, this instant laid out before them. Jade shoves at Artemis. The touch isn’t hard, though it does leave a little whisper of discomfort, and it reminds Artemis to close her mouth and put her feet on the ground, one in front of the other.

At this moment, Artemis just knows her father’s story lacks information, that he has given her some of the facts but not enough of them at once, and she’d ask for more, but is afraid of appearing greedy. She nods and shoulders her pack and puts her head down, ignoring the quick, hurt look Jade throws in her direction. Artemis thinks the look is hurt; it’s hard to tell, in the dark, in the little glow of this new information.

There are some things Artemis needs to keep safe, keep at a distance: years later, when her father is finally rid of her, she will hold on to this moment, the moment in which she thinks he might have loved her. She’s used to this lesson, at least.

 

*

The mission is long and tedious and Artemis knows it’s at an end only after she manages to push out from under the body pinning her down. Jade kicks the guy until he stops trying to stand back up, and keeps kicking until his skull has a funny, sick bend in it. Artemis has seen men die before, and she's even seen men break their skulls, but Jade's cool savagery hits her in the gut; if Dad weren't in the room, Artemis might vomit.

Dad is here, though, and Artemis knows not to advertise her weaknesses. Usually the way her family deals with discomfort is to meet it head on until it loses its power: total immersion. It's Dad's favorite instructional method, and he uses it for everything from foreign language skills to neutralizing targets.

“Catch you on the flip side,” Jade says, her voice a terrible dead weight. She doesn’t come home with them that night, doesn’t even stay long enough to help butcher and hide the bodies.

“Remember,” Dad tells her later, while they work, “you’re responsible for your own mess. You’re old enough to clean up after yourself.”

 

*

 

A few days after the first job Artemis comes along on, Jade cuts off all her wild, tangled hair and then sits sullenly in a kitchen chair while Dad snips it closer to her scalp with the sharp scissors Mom always kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet. On anyone else, the haircut would be ugly and strange and harsh, but the brutal shortness of the cut makes Artemis realize how beautiful Jade is, how sharp and utterly unhappy. The bluntness of it—not style whatsoever—makes her look fey, perhaps a little androgynous; she’s fourteen and lithe, with barely a curve to her body. Even her hips are sharp little points, with no roundness to them at all.

“You look like a boy,” Dad mutters, trimming Jade’s nape and holding her still in the chair with his free hand, the palm directly against her scalp. “A goddamn boy, what the hell is wrong with you.”

“You take that back,” Jade hisses, tensed as if to spring up, but Dad just sort of mildly increases the amount of weight he’s putting into her hold on her skull and Artemis watches as Jade settles at the pressure, seething. If Dad didn’t have scissors so close to her neck, Jade’s shoulders would be up around her ears.

“I still think you’re pretty,” Artemis offers, truthful and hesitant and clumsy, not sure if it’s worth anything. Her contributions usually aren’t. 

“If we’re comparing notes, that’s not much to open with,” Jade snaps, vicious and unappeased. “You’re no competition at all. Your stuffed bear is prettier than you, and it doesn’t even have a face.”

“Jade,” Dad says, because it’s Jade’s fault (or just Jade’s doing) that Bear has no face: she cut it off and sewed over the space with an old pillowcase, so the whole front of Bear’s head is blank and featureless and terrifying, not unlike Dad’s work face. Jade settles, again, as much as she is capable of doing, and Artemis takes the movement and all of its undercurrents as a sign to retreat. There’s a fight brewing and she has not got any ammunition. She just has all of her hair, and from now on, no matter how long or tangles it becomes, no matter how long it takes her to brush it out, Artemis will never cut her hair short. The look on her sister’s face is cautionary, too raw and expensive to ever want for herself, especially as Artemis does not understand, really, what compelled Jade to become shorn: it is certainly not penitence. It is not the attention of others, either; Jade is, like and unlike Artemis, wholly invisible when she wants to be, incandescently obvious if she wants to be seen. 

It’s a narrow few hours later—the time singing tense and brittle throughout the apartment, time during which Artemis tries to do her homework and gives it up in favor of picking at the fletching of the new arrows she is still perfecting her use of—when Jade gets up from the table and leaves. Like usual, their father doesn’t see the use in talking to Artemis about what has happened.

“Either you’ll figure these things out or you won’t,” he says when she musters the courage to ask him about the scene in their dimly-lit kitchen, as she carefully sweeps up the scattered remains of Jade’s dark hair. “You keep saying you’re not a baby. Here’s a chance to prove it to me.”

 

*

 

Three days after, Artemis goes out with her father and ends the mission by getting thrown through a glass window and into the icy waters of the north Atlantic. It becomes painfully apparent that her swimming needs a great deal of work and her timing requires even more precision drills, and in the course of correcting these deficiencies—in the next three days—she becomes fully cognizant of a painful itch creeping across her scalp, pricking and needling from her nape to her brow. She tries not to squirm or otherwise draw attention to it—she broke her wrist in the fall and every movement still makes her ache. Dad isn’t much pleased with her performance, but Dad is Dad, so he catches the intent of her fidgeting and settles one hand on her shoulder. His touch is gentle enough that Artemis’ rising bruises don’t hurt, but its still heavy enough that her heart stutters slow and fast in her chest.

“Settle and wait,” Dad says. “It’s how Crocks play the game.”

“Yessir,” she slurs out, and twitches again at the sensation across her scalp. Of its own volition, her free hand slides up into the tangles of her hair, fingers poised to scratch. Dad’s hand catches hers, and Artemis cannot fathom the tableaux: her father in front of her, holding her gaze with his own, one hand on her shoulder, keeping in contact. She lets her wrist go slack and Dad draws her hand out of her hair: Artemis’ fingertips come away bloody and her head throbs. Dad lets go her wrist and spreads his fingers out over her head and presses down, slow and sharp, and Artemis yelps at the sensation. 

“The damn glass,” Dad says, disgusted. He pulls his hand away and rubs his fingers over his palm, smoothing away the sensation of her studded scalp. “Let’s clean you up.”

He leaves her in order to assemble the necessary tools: hot water, alcohol, tweezers, an empty plate, a towel. He sets these things on the table and waits for Artemis to lay them out in the most accessible order before pulling a standing lamp close and removing its shade; sitting close in the light, Dad puts his hand on Artemis’ shoulder again and draws her head down to rest on the table she he can comb through her hair: sure enough, there’s glass from that shattered window still embedded in her scalp, and her skin is making a valiant effort to heal over the little shards.

“How many,” Artemis asks, making every effort to sound nonchalant. Her skin itches and crawls and burns.

“Sit tight,” is all Dad says, and pulls the tweezers from the alcohol and digs the tips in, prying out the first shard. It hurts, and Artemis can’t stop the way she shudders at the pain, even though it hurts less than going through the window in the first place.

While he works, she sets her chin firm against her arm against the table and doesn’t bite her lip; Dad’s not much for easy conversation, so Artemis distracts herself by following the table’s wood grain patterns spiral in and out. This close, her vision blurs in and out of focus, blurring mostly out of focus as her father methodically pulls glass from skin. The brightness of the bare lamp over her head makes her eyes water; the pain settles and transforms itself into a beautiful blankness, a whiteness, a lightness.

(Artemis is too stubborn to cry, she tells herself; this does not hurt. This does not hurt. This could be so much worse.)

Her father finds sixteen shards; once they’re out, he douses her hair in saline, which she has trouble rinsing out, and which leaves her feeling brittle and tousled for days. Artemis is unable to really brush her hair for a week after all this, until the cuts heal up enough that she won’t reopen them. It’s good practice, her father tells her; but she is never sure for what.


End file.
